The Great Resignation is set to hit Australian workplaces in the next six to 12 months with 2 million people ready to quit their jobs, new research revealed exclusively by news.com.au has shown.
showed a incredibly unhappy workforce he can hardly bear to stay with his current employer.
Job satisfaction has plummeted as 42 per cent of Australians experience fatigue and burnout, while 34 per cent have been affected by increased workload due to staffing shortages and failure to replace lost employeesshowed research from insurer Allianz Australia.
Melanie* is an Australian who experienced burnout so severe that she quit her job with nothing more to come.
The 45-year-old had been in her sales manager role for seven years, but when the pandemic hit she felt “work never went off.”
She put in an extra two or three hours a day, but the endless meetings brought her to “breaking point,” as well as taking care of her team without support from above.
“People would show up on my schedule in a row and I would end up with eight one-hour appointments and find myself literally running between appointments to get something to eat or go to the bathroom. That was really stressful to have these days all of a sudden with no breaks,” he told news.com.au.
“What really burned me was trying to help everyone too much. I’m a very caring person and a caring manager and I really got very involved in making sure everyone was okay, that’s definitely one of the reasons I got burned out.
“I felt absolutely exhausted, it wasn’t even the work, it was the stress and how worried everyone was about whether we would keep our jobs. It was a really intense moment.”
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‘desperate move’
The South Australian ended up sick with autoimmune symptoms and was forced to admit that she had reached her limit. She decided that she had to make a “risky move”.
“I actually quit before I knew what to do next, which is a pretty desperate move,” he revealed.
“I found that I could no longer cope with the stress of myself and the team.”
He spent seven months on sick leave and recently returned to work part-time as he is still recovering from the physical and mental impacts of burnout.
It has seen her leave sales and move into a training role and it has also meant taking a dazzling pay cut.
“I used to make $150,000 to $190,000 depending on commission and currently if I work full time I would have $100,000, it was a pay cut of at least $80,000 that I took but it seemed worth it,” he said .
It’s a “shame” that people have to “completely break down” before turning things around and she urges Australians to step back from work before it’s too late.
However, it wasn’t just exhaustion that sent Australians looking for work. They were also fed up with being underpaid and nearly a third cited it as one of the main reasons they are looking to leave, the research found.
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The workplace wave
But Julie Mitchell, chief general manager of personal injury at Allianz Australia, said the trend unfolding is broader than the Great Resignation, in a term coined as The Workplace Wave.
The trend is defined by isolation from colleagues and managers, high turnover issues, lack of flexibility, and employees becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the role of work in their lives, forcing them to look for a new job.
It is also characterized by employees who remain dissatisfied with the proportion of time they spend working each day, which is compounded by managers who fail to acknowledge overworked staff and a mentally unhealthy workplace.
This means Australian workplaces face “real risk” with the sheer number of people intending to quit their jobs, he added.
“Despite emerging from the depths of the pandemic, workplace disruption has not abated. Employees have emerged with renewed values and a change in the way they approach work, prompting the emergence of concepts such as ‘the right to unplug’, ‘quit loudly’, ‘resign quietly’ and ‘act on your pay’ “, said.
“All of these trends are real-world examples of The Workplace Wave, and organizations that are not equipped to respond effectively are likely to experience all the effects: higher employee turnover, employee disengagement, and in some cases, a mental health workers’ compensation claim.
‘Acting your salary’
‘The right to unplug’ and ‘act according to your salary’ is particularly playing out among the younger generations, Ms Mitchell added.
“I think it’s really interesting about the generational differences that we’re seeing in the workplace, in particular, our Gen Z population thinks it’s important that work hours are set according to what they’re paid for, while that Generation X and Boomers are happy to work the hours. that are required to do the job,” he told news.com.au.
But managers will alienate staff if they don’t demonstrate their own limits in terms of time in the workplace, he explained.
“The loud exit is really something that speaks to the importance of having the right tone from the top of the organization around mental health and reducing the stigma around mental health, so it’s about leaders talk about your own situations and the challenges you’re experiencing. she revealed.
“It’s also about most of the older people going to take a break or telling people they need to leave today at 4pm to pick up the kids and it’s about letting the workplace know it’s okay. leave and… they can drive to make sure workplaces are mentally healthy.”
Increase in mental health claims
While more than half of managers believe their company has gone to great lengths to provide support and systems to create mentally healthy workplaces, the data shows otherwise.
Figures from Allianz revealed that there was a 19 percent increase in days off work for mental health claims in the last three years.
Ms. Mitchell said that the increase in mental health claims is one of the key causes of workload pressure.
“Our trend has shown that incidences of mental health claims continue to rise and we believe that trend will continue,” he added.
The Great Resignation, which saw millions of people in the US. quit their jobs from executive level to retail workers in 2021 emerged in Australia over the past year.
Nearly 10 per cent of the Australian workforce quit their jobs last year, a a whopping 1.3 million peopleaccording to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, that was the largest number of Australians who changed jobs since 2012.
*Name has been changed for privacy reasons
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